What is a silent push notification?

A silent push notification is a hidden instruction that is delivered to the app on a user's device. Instead of causing an interaction with the user like a typical push notification, silent notifications will simply quietly deliver a certain set of data to the app, allowing the app to act upon that data.

Publishers commonly use silent push to let apps know that new content is available. A podcast app, for example, may publish a new episode and then may opt to send all devices a silent notification that would direct the app to start downloading that particular episode in the background. Similarly an app publisher might leverage a silent notification in order to send instructions that remotely activate or deactivate certain features for a particular audience, or even to trigger A/B tests of different app experiences.

Publishers can leverage Localytics in order to deliver silent push notifications via our Push API, or through the dashboard by simply leaving the body of their push notification blank when drafting their creative.